Follow Saif Ali Khan

At the recently held IIFA event, filmmaker Karan Johar
and actors Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan took a potshot at Kangana Ranaut by
chanting ‘nepotism rocks’. Social media users highly slammed the trio for
taking at dig at the ‘Queen’ actress. Feeling the pressure, Karan Johar
apologized to Kangana at a television interview while Varun seeks apology to
Kangana on social media. Saif Ali Khan was left to seek apology to his ‘Rangoon’
co-star which he has finally done.

In an open letter, Saif Ali
Khan, wrote that he had “apologised” to her, and he doesn’t “owe anybody else
an explanation. The issue is over.”

He says it was just a joke, “It’s
not something that I wrote or something I believe in. It was a joke on
ourselves, between Varun (Dhawan), Karan (Johar) and me. It was not supposed to
be a big deal, but I realised at some point, that it might have offended
Kangana (Ranaut). I called her and apologised personally. That should be the
end of it. Everybody needs to take a chill pill and back off,” he wrote.

Saif wrote about the negative
stories published about the issue. “What I can’t seem to understand are some of
the media reactions to this. While most people have been sensible, three
reporters from the websites BollywoodLife, The Quint and Elle India, made a
point of saying that all I did was use big words like eugenics and genetics,”
he wrote.

He then went ahead to attack the journalist who wrote the
article in Elle. “As for the girl from Elle: I’m sorry you found words like
eugenics in a conversation about nepotism misplaced. Perhaps if you got your
head out of the hemline of the actress of the month and read a book, your
vocabulary might improve.”

“Nepotism is probably least prevalent in the movie industry
and rampant in politics and business,” he wrote, speculating that perhaps what
Kangana means when she accuses the industry of nepotism, “is that people from
Dharma or Yashraj are against people like her, who have come up the hard way
without their support and that they only support their own people.”

“Whether that is true or not I have no idea and it’s none of
my business,” he conceded.

“Nepotism cannot
work in the film industry because it is a democracy. The film industry is the
most fair line of work. So yes, maybe I got a chance because of my mother, but
that is more genetics than nepotism. It’s a genetic investment that the
producer was making,” he wrote.

Saif also said
that “for every star kid, there are many guys and girls from total non-filmi
backgrounds. Take Shah Rukh Khan, Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit-Nene, Jackie Shroff.”

“It’s
the audience that makes a film a hit,” he wrote, and “not the family members.”